Sound Advice: Audio for Interviews (page 2)

Recording Strategies

In setting up a sound recording system, the objective is to provide clean, easily edited tracks. To do this, you can choose to record one track or two, and each approach has multiple sub-options.
If you're using the modern interview style that seems like a subject monologue rather than a Q&A session, you can mike the interviewee only. The off-mike interviewer will still be audible enough for reference during editing. (For tips on interview approaches, check out the July 2000 issue of Videomaker, page 102.)
If you want high-quality recordings of both parties, you may wish to place a mike between them on a stand or fishpole boom; or, budget permitting, mike them separately and use a production mixer to balance input levels.
For the greatest possible flexibility, you'll want to lay the two audio streams on separate tracks. One way to do this is by feeding each mono mike to one channel of a stereo input. That way, you get separate tracks synced to a single video.
In a classroom or similar setup, you may be shooting with a separate camcorder covering each party. That can solve two problems at once. Both participants have separate mikes permanently optimized to record them and each audio is recorded on a separate …